Blog
The next three months of October, November and December are the optimal time of the year to conduct Business Review Meetings with your current clients – especially your top clients, or a client that you feel is a little rocky.
A business review meeting is valuable for you and your clients, too!
In my years of sales, I found this to be a game-changer that moves relationships from vendor to a more trusting partnership. This is also a great opportunity for you to invite other decision makers and influencers to this meeting such as other divisions or department heads, their boss, other key employees, buyers and stakeholders.
Here are seven ways a business review meeting can improve your sales results:
- It’s a great opportunity to have a purposeful sales conversation with your valuable clients and find out what is working, what is not working and for you to give recommendations to strengthen the relationship.
- It helps position you as a valuable resource to review the year and begin planning for the entire next year, rather than project by project or visit by visit.
- You can better understand their goals and initiatives. This is very important – when they start talking about their future initiatives listen for opportunities on how you can help them.
- Many companies are in planning and budgeting mode right now, which makes it an ideal time to secure your services for next year.
- Your clients are challenged as to what they are going to do better or differently next year. A business review meeting is a great opportunity to brainstorm with them and provide recommendations. This positions you as a business resource, not just as someone who sells a product or service.
- Your competitors are not doing it! This is an incredibly effective way to keep your competitors from getting in the door with your top clients.
- Your client relationship might be a bit rocky. That means a pro-active approach on your part to discuss the current issues and how you can resolve them will position you more favorably.
Here’s how you position the conversation to secure this business review meeting:
“We value your business. We have been working with you during the past xxx years, we would like to schedule a Business Review Meeting in the next few weeks with you to review the past year and your plans for next year. This meeting agenda can include what is working, what could be improved upon, better understanding of your future goals and initiatives, any challenges you are facing and recommendations from both us on how we can provide more value to strengthen your business. We would like to include xxx in this meeting. You’re welcome to extend this invitation to …(great opportunity to suggest including their boss or other decision makers, buyers, stakeholders in the meeting.)
You can personally call them and/or send them an email with at least two to three date options and times.
Now, create a list of your top three to ten clients, pick up the phone, or send out the email and schedule this Business Review Meeting.
You’ll be amazed at how well this meeting is received and how you’ll secure a stronger partnership (and revenue) for 2019 and beyond or fix a rocky client situation.
Let me know how your Business Meetings go with your client. Email me at lisa@teneoresults.com
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog
It’s another very full and crazy year – are you feeling the same? For the past several years, I have committed to completing a half marathon each year. It would have been easy to say, “I’m too busy to do something for me.”
Do you think the same way?
Even though I know it’s hard work and takes weekly discipline, I know I mentally and physically always feel better when I run and train for an upcoming race.
This year, to help improve my productivity and discipline, I used more technology features on my watch. I was able to set my watch to ten minutes of running and one minute of walking. Many avid runners and many of the running magazines will state that you will have a faster run with a better race time when you follow the 10:1 principle. It’s great to have my watch beep at these exact times to keep me on track, and I stuck to it.
Even during my longest training run of 20km and I was running on my own, technology became my accountability buddy! When I wasn’t using the walk/run function, it was too easy to walk when I got tired or felt like it…or walk longer than a minute.
I’ll admit when I work in sales, I rarely take breaks and eat lunch at my desk – pushing full throttle all day and even into the evening.
I wonder if I would work more productively if I applied this principle. Perhaps, working one hour then taking a five-minute break.
Technology allowed me to have a plan and work the plan.
Technology would not allow my self-talk to get in the way. It motivated me to stay the course and work the plan. I looked forward to the beeps of what to do next. Technology allowed me to enjoy the run more, as I had to think less and allow my mind to enjoy the scenery.
This year, we decided to commit to a destination run to make it more fun. We chose the Rock’ n Roll run in Montreal. There were bands and music throughout the run route to entertain and motivate us throughout the beautiful run along the river and downtown Montreal core.
It was an incredible run…the weather was perfect for running, the strong voices of the Montreal city cheered us on throughout the race, and my brother and his family were at the last corner of the race to cheer us on with their signs to cross the finish line!
The Sales Race can be long and exhausting, with lots of twists, turns, and hills – yet exhilarating when you cross the finish line of your fiscal sale year by slam dunking your sales goal. How will you use technology, accountability buddies and a different destination or route to make it more fun, gain a different perspective and add a stronger pace to your sales plan?
My next goal is to complete ten half-marathons – and I have one more to go!
I’ll have to start researching where my next sales race will take me in 2019.
What will you do for yourself? Stop making excuses and do something for you!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog
How many sales days and hours do you actually have to achieve your sales goals?
Only 57% of sellers will achieve their sales target this year.
I have heard countless excuses why salespeople don’t reach their monthly, quarterly or annual targets. Aside from the standard “competitor”, “price” and “economy” reasons, I have also heard reps say things like, “I was at a tradeshow for four days this month”, “The sales meeting took me away from my territory” or other such excuses. Here’s the reality – we don’t have as much selling time as we think, and we miscalculate our sales per day or per hour.
When I first started in sales, I wanted to be a million-dollar sales producer and get my name on the Million Dollar Plaque. My boss, the VP of Sales, shared an important formula. To produce one million dollars in sales, I would have to generate on average $20,000 in weekly revenue or $500 for every hour I was working. I was very proud to realize I was worth $500/hour. Then I realized I couldn’t consistently sell $500/hour every hour with all the non-sales stuff that gets in the way.
Long-term success in sales doesn’t just happen; it takes planning and strategizing and part of that planning is calculating the actual number of selling days and selling hours you have available.
A few years ago, I worked through an exercise that helped one of my clients dramatically improve the productivity of their outside sales team.
We started by having the reps estimate how many selling days they had available for the upcoming year. If we start with 365 days minus 104 days for weekends, 15 days for vacation and 10 statutory days, that leaves us with 236 days. Then we can look at other pre-determined commitments such as tradeshows, conferences, sales meetings, training, etc. This includes travel time to and from each event (this varied from rep to rep depending on their geographical location). Then we asked them to calculate travel time to and from “out-of-town” client appointments. We got them to record their office/admin days as well.
After this was completed, the team realized that they had far fewer selling days than they originally thought. In fact, after the revised calculations, the average dropped to 150 – 200 selling days in the year.
However, this was only phase one of our exercise.
Next, was phase two. We had each rep plot out their annual sales target and identify how they could achieve that goal, either with existing clients or new prospects. This activity was an eye-opener because no one had actually taken the time to figure out HOW they were going to attain that year’s sales target.
This helped the team determine where they would get the sales revenue from rather than just think about it. Several of the reps realized that they needed to get more business from their existing clients. Others thought acquiring new clients would be a more effective approach.
But wait, we weren’t done yet!
In phase three we had the reps look at their existing clients and rate them based on sales volume and profitability. Then we had them look back and calculate how much time they spent with each client throughout the previous year. This is the ROTI factor – return on time invested.
This was a huge eye-opener!
Several of the reps noticed that they spent an inordinate amount of time with clients who generated very little revenue or profit and they realized that spending that much time with these customers was actually costing them money. They started to see that they could improve their results by investing more time with higher-value customers.
Business planning is not just an exercise for business owners, sales leaders, executives and shareholders. Successful salespeople also create business plans to outline their go-forward strategy.
Planning may not be glamorous or fun work. I love it because it improves my self-talk to strategize and have a plan to achieve my goals. It is extremely effective in helping you achieve your sales targets, exceed your sales goals and improve your overall sales productivity and ROTI.
Thought Provoking Question: How many selling days and selling hours do you actually have left this year to ensure you achieve your sales goal? How will you maximize your ROTI?
Teneo Challenge: Use this template to complete your own Profitable Client ROTI Analysis, to help you have a successful fall selling season and begin planning for an epic 2019.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog |
What’s the most important conversation we have in sales? It’s the one we have before we even speak with our customer – our self-talk – because the tone of our internal monologue can determine whether we make that sale or not.
Good self-talk helps us stay positive and responsive with our customers. But negative self-talk cuts into our confidence, and the pessimism it creates projects through our body language and tone. Who would you rather buy from?
How’s your self-talk? Do you keep it upbeat and constructive, or do you get bogged down in head trash? As Henry Ford famously remarked, “Think you can, think you can’t; either way you’ll be right.”
It’s just common sense; a positive attitude
will reliably produce better 
results. And a recent study out of Stanford University revealed that a positive attitude literally makes your brain work better – so attitude also impacts achievement!
While it’s easy to be upbeat when things are going well, the real test is maintaining that positive attitude when they’re not. This is where your self-talk can either save you or sink you.
What is self-talk?
Have you ever wondered if you are the only person who talks to yourself, or if it’s even “normal”? You’re not – and it is!
While most people don’t have a dialogue with themselves out loud, all of us have some sort of self-talk taking place in our minds during our waking hours. You probably assume that the content of that ongoing monologue is out of your control, but like so much else in life, the tone you set with your self-talk is a habit, and habits can be changed once we’re aware of them.
Stop right now and take a moment to listen to what you are telling yourself as you read this. Maybe you’re thinking, “This customer meeting is going to be a waste of my time – they are not going to buy anything from me today.” That one-sided conversation you’re having is the greatest determinant of whether today’s work will be a powerful learning experience or not.
Does your self-talk support you or does that voice in your head tear down your efforts and dwell on the dark side? The truth is, you get what you expect, and if your self-talk is full of can’ts, won’ts, and nevers, your predictions are likely to come true. If you think you can’t – you’re right! We may not know how it all works, but we do know that how you talk to yourself has a tremendous impact on your life and your sales performance.
Will your self-talk help you or hurt you? That’s up to you.
Realize that when you take action to improve your self-talk, you enhance your self-image, burnish your personal brand, and kick-start your sales performance and behaviours to catapult RESULTS!
Teneo Challenge: Think about how you can improve your self-talk to be more positive.
As we move into the fall selling season, what is your self-talk to ensure you will successfully achieve your sales goals for this year?
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog
Wow – it’s hard to believe – only 100 days left to achieve this year’s sales goals!
I’m not trying to rush summer or the end of the year. Some of you might be thinking it’s about 120 days to the end of the year, but the reality is you’re not going to be closing sales between Christmas and New Year’s. Are you on track to achieve your sales goals before the end of the year?
I’ve been in sales for over 20 years and I’m still the Chief Sales Officer in our business! Just about every year, at the onset of the fourth quarter, I’ll admit… I go into stress and panic mode as my drive and desire to succeed can be overwhelming.
Each year I have a stronger and more strategic sales plan than the previous year, but I also have a bigger sales goal each year.
So, at this time of year, I still find myself in panic mode wondering, “Do I have enough in my pipeline to make my goal?” “Where else can I find additional business that will close before year end?” “Have I done everything necessary to make my number?”
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
• Are you on track to achieve your goals?
• What will you START doing?
• What will you STOP doing?
• What will you DO DIFFERENTLY?
• What do you want to be MOST proud of accomplishing on December 31st? Or realistically, by December 21st?
For those of you like me, who have been working hard all year, but realize you’re still a bit short of achieving your big sales goal for the year, let me share with you some of the things I am going to START, STOP and DO DIFFERENTLY to ensure I slam dunk our big, hairy, audacious sales goal this year and guarantee a celebration on December 31st!
I’m going to START creating a new list of all the clients that I will contact to secure business this fall. I’m going to START making calls, not just one day a week, but three days a week with ten connections per day. I will schedule the one hour per day in my calendar to hold myself accountable to complete these calls on the chosen days and then update it in our CRM system, rather than my favourite Hot List Spreadsheet.
I’m going to STOP allowing any interruptions, procrastination or excuses to get in the way of making these ten calls each day. I’m also going to STOP any self-doubt of not achieving this sales goal. I’m going to kick any of those negative thoughts out of my brain – there is no room for this type of saboteur talk this fall.
I will add Social Media as my “DO DIFFERENTLY”. I’m going to use LinkedIn Navigator to find new leads and use the digital analytics of social media to help me better understand who may be interested in our services.
I will be proud of achieving our sales goal over the next 100 days…and will savour the taste of champagne to celebrate the achievement of this goal on December 31st.
Teneo Challenge: Figure out what you need to stop, start and do differently and then share your sales success with us!
What will you be doing over the next 100 days to achieve sales success this quarter?
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
